Soon, we can add the Electoral College to the long list of American institutions whose failure this election season will result in a butternut squash-colored bigot occupying the Oval Office in January.
Trump fans will argue with this assessment because: a) it denies their candidate’s legitimacy as the winner of the November 8 election, and b) because in terms of its mechanics, the Electoral College is working just fine. Also c) Shut up, libtard! Pending the call for recounts in three states, Trump won the popular vote in enough states to earn the minimum of 270 electors that give him the presidency. It does not matter that he lost the national popular vote by, as of now, more than two million ballots. By all the rules of the Electoral College game, the real-estate mogul won the presidency fair and square.
But the issue here is not the mechanics of the Electoral College. The issue is both its anti-democratic nature and its longtime function as nothing more than a rubber stamp to validate its winner. So when faced with a crisis of legitimacy, institutional torpor and habit prevent it from rising to the occasion. And on Dec. 19 the Electoral College will meekly allow itself to get steamrollered.
The Electoral College is the result of a compromise made when the Constitution was being drafted by the Founding Fathers. Some of the founders, chief among them James Madison, wanted presidents to be chosen by popular vote. Others, chiefly Alexander Hamilton, had two concerns. The first was with the Southern states, which preferred the Electoral College because the number of electors per state is decided based on the number of the state’s congressional representatives. With its non-voting slaves counted as three-fifths of a person for apportionment of those representatives (and thus Electoral College votes), the South could maintain its power in the national legislature.
The second concern, of Hamilton and others, was that the people would one day fall for a populist, unqualified demagogue, and vote him into office. The electors, therefore, would be a check on raw democracy, a buffer between the rabble and the “learned” and independent electors who would have a clearer sense of the country’s interests.
In practice, however, the Electoral College has never worked like that. In all but four of our presidential elections, including this one, the winner of the popular vote winner has also won the Electoral College. The electors who gather just before Christmas in their respective state capitals to cast their votes have always ratified the decision of the votes in their state, not challenged it.
So over the centuries the EC has devolved. It is now yet one more example of the highly polarized partisanship of the rest of our democracy. Rather than a repository of learned people acting in the best interests of the country, the electors chosen to represent states in the Electoral College are a collection of loyal party hacks, activists and elected officials. If the selection of electors is a formality, why would state parties choose rabble-rousers?
Source: Salon: in-depth news, politics, business, technology & culture > Politics
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